Motivational Quotes

Criticism

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

- Lowell, James Russell

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

10.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

11.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

12.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

13.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

14.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

15.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

16.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

17.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

18.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

19.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

20.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

21.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

22.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

23.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

24.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

25.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

26.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

27.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

30.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

31.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

32.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

33.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

34.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

36.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

37.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

38.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

39.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

40.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

41.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

42.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

43.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

44.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

45.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

46.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

47.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

48.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

49.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

50.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence